


Always Always

by delazeur



Series: Are You There, Maker? It's Me, Marian. [2]
Category: Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age II
Genre: Anders Needs a Hug, Angst, Bad!Flirting, F/M, Game Dialogue Gets Choppitied, Hawke Needs a Hug, Hawke is a dork, Hurt/Comfort, Implied Post-Game Adventures, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Not Actually Unrequited Love, Romance, fluff if you squint
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-09
Updated: 2014-03-09
Packaged: 2018-01-15 03:23:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,472
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1289359
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/delazeur/pseuds/delazeur
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Marian Hawke plays with Anders' hair a thousand times over their lives together. Here are a few of the important ones. </p>
<p>This is the same Marian Hawke and Anders that appear in "Find Your Way Home"</p>
            </blockquote>





	Always Always

**Author's Note:**

> This story came about because I saw this [prompt](http://dragonage-kink.livejournal.com/11099.html?thread=43483995#t43483995) on the DA kinkmeme and thinking about petting Anders' hair. 
> 
> Unfortunately this story fulfills pretty much nothing requested in the prompt, so someone else will have to fill it.

It was slavers the first time. The first time Hawke wound up with Anders’ head pillowed in her lap her fingers gently tugging the leather cord from his hair. That first time she combed her fingers through that tangle, alone in the dark, while she bit back tears. 

_Oh, Marian, what in the void are you thinking?_

In love with a man she’d known for weeks, a man who loved men, and women, whores and even Rivaini pirate queens, but had only vague bemusement for the skinny rogue in the dark leathers. She was thinking, more or less, that she wanted to die, if she were to die, pining in the dark with her concussed-mage-unrequited-object-of-affection unconscious on her thighs, trying not to think about how he smelled like elfroot and lemon balm. 

The cavern ceiling had fallen after an explosion. A trap or a ball of fire from a mage? Who could tell? But she had hit Anders in the small of his back as she lunged out from under the path of the fall, not quite quick enough to save him from a fist-sized lump of granite colliding with his temple, making him go noodly and blank and then away. 

_You’ve never been quite quick enough, though._

_Poor Carver._

She hoped the others were okay.

Each pass of her hand was the same. Fingers contacted his skin at the temple above his hairline on the side of his head opposite the horrifying goose egg. Then they would curl slowly until they drew into his scalp, combing gently into the strands. Before she could pull too far into the length, where the knots and the tangles dwelled, she would release and resume the light touch against his temple. 

His hair was like silk and she wished her coarse, ragged mop was half so interesting on a good day. Coated in stone dust and stiff with blood and sweat, it was one of the worst days. 

It could have been tacky with darkspawn blood or spider ichor. Those things were always fun.

He smelled so good, even with the blood and the smoke and the sweat and…

_Dear Maker, please let him not hate me for thinking I’d like to sniff him like a branch of lilac, or daphne, or dianthus, or roses, or lilies, and if he did smell like any of those things that would be okay, but I like the elfroot and the lemon balm. Love, Marian._

She looked down at the vague shadows of his face in the dark, where it was probably smooth and slack, and begged him not to die, while she sat there with no potions, no poultices. Proved, in fact, to be the worst person ever to be the boss of anyone since she maybe couldn’t keep the one man who was in charge of everyone else not dying alive through one stupid cave-in. 

“Please, love. Don’t die.” It was an indulgence, and she knew it, but she pressed her lips to his forehead while her fingers dragged through the silk of his hair in the dark, and she imagined the red-gold twined through her fingers like rings.

* * *

The second time was in the Deep Roads. 

Anders had turned into a shrill tadpole of himself, fists against his temples, head tucked while his mouth wouldn’t stop moving. “Not in the dark, not in the dark, not in the dark, we don’t die here, not in the dark, you promised not in the dark.” 

It wasn’t that dark, really. The witchlight of the lyrium made sure of that. But watching the puffs of his feathered pauldrons bristle around his ears as he ducked low and hugged his knees, Hawke couldn’t look at that and live with herself. 

_Are you easing the suffering of your fellow man now? Altruism, finally you’ve found it!_

Her boots were silent on the gritty stone. They stopped at his side. 

“Anders?” Her voice was gentle, low, and still as springwater. Every time she said his name she was saying _love_ , as if she had learned the wrong word for it at some point in her childhood and it stuck. She Andersed the pale sunlight of Fereldan spring. She Andersed spiced Orlesian chocolate. She rubbed her nose on the back of her hand. It was a fiction, when she said his name. 

_No sense letting him know how you really feel._

Oh, how could he not know? She’d made the worst passes at him, practically drooled in his lap, though that was figurative, not like the time he’d literally drooled on her lap after the cave-in. He couldn’t _not_ know. Could he? 

He didn’t twitch or shift, regardless, when she called his name. She settled onto her haunches next to him, leather braies creaking. She reached out to rest a hand on the back of his neck and his eyes, which had been sightlessly staring, closed. 

That was something, at least. 

She let her fingers walk up to the string that bound his hair. After weeks underground the strands no longer felt like silk, thick and muddy with grease and dust. But she pulled the string free just the same and slowly worked her fingers through his hair. She let them travel from the top of his brow back through his hairline to comb all the way to the ends. 

_Fuck the tangles. He needs to know you’re here._

After the tenth or the fortieth pass of her fingers his eyelashes fluttered and the amber depths of his irises turned toward her face. “Hawke?” 

She let her hand drop, knuckles resting on the grit, pressing down so that the skin abraded against the years and the stone. “Hawke was my father’s name. You should call me, Marian, handsome.”

The line was painful, even to her, even more now the hundredth time she’d used it, and it was a blighted relief to hear their companions returning: Bethany with a glittering sheen to her eyes, Isabela sauntering and looking nowhere so often as the younger Hawke’s rear, Merrill bouncing gamely along while Varric insisted there was another way out, and Fenris, silent and resigned following. 

_Well, you always wanted your own menagerie of fantastical creatures, Marian. Congratulations._

Despite the still feverish glaze to Anders eyes, Hawke accepted it. She should be congratulated. She had been granted a menagerie, but it was also a family. 

When Anders asked about the thong, before she had even straightened from her crouch, Hawke shrugged and grinned sidelong at him. “You don’t need it.” 

“I might need to see, eventually.” Crisp, acerbic, looking at her from under the lank strands that now fell all unruly in his face. He always seemed to be pushing away from them, from her, but he couldn’t quite manage to leave. 

“Why? Something you have your eye on? Or someone?” She let her lips curve into a slow, hopeful smile. 

_He doesn’t want to look at you, you ninny._

Plainly, she was running a bit hysterical 

Anders only looked disturbed and slipped away. When Hawke caught a glimpse of him later, hair tied back once more and whispering with Merrill, she collapsed onto her bedroll and died. Yep, just died. He had sought out the company of the blood mage instead of her. Wasn’t that just fine? 

No. No it was not.

* * *

There were other times she’d cheated. Sneaking up behind him to skate her palm over the tuft of the ponytail. Leaning close enough when she passed behind his chair to catch just a little of the scent she remembered. 

It was a real bitch getting better at things. No more cave-ins or nervous collapses. No more reasons to run her fingers through his hair to soothe him or herself in moments of panic. 

_Poor thing, a victim of your own success._

The increased skill wasn’t all bad. 

Hawke leaned back in her chair, eyes flicking around the table in Varric’s room, looking for tells in the other players. She was out this hand, having just returned with a round of drinks, and it was always easier to work out who was bluffing when she didn’t have to worry about all the ridiculous things her own face was doing. 

The most ridiculous face at the table was currently to her right, hunched close to his hand, losing profoundly, with a grimace that would flash and flicker as he forgot and then remembered he was trying to bluff. Justice was probably telling him that bluffing was unjust. 

_The same way he seems to think sleep is unjust, and food, and probably shoes._

She hadn’t seen Anders smile in a week, and he was only at the Hanged Man tonight because she had lied about it being Merrill’s nameday. It was either that or drag him out of his clinic by the hair. 

An idea not without its merits. 

The look he’d given her when Merrill confusedly explained her nameday wasn’t for three months… the glare had been quite heated.

She shifted in her seat, where her smalls were still clung a bit damply, letting her eyes settle on his profile. She could reach over so easily and smooth the frown off his forehead if he would let her. 

_You are going to have to let it go._

But she wouldn’t. She still managed to prod him, flirt over his exasperation with her, but he was already so worn and she hated, hated the tired, flat smile that he gave her sometimes. She would rather his glares and scowls than that empty, elsewhere smile. 

Well, then. 

The knife in her boot came free easily when she stretched her arm down around the back of her chair and squirmed a little sideways. She let her hand hang over the chair, grasping the dagger lightly. She flicked her eyes around the table and reached for her ale with the other hand. 

When Anders shrugged irritably she took another sip, looking to see if he was watching her, or if he was just that disgusted with his cards. The roll of his shoulders made him look like a mantling hawk. 

_Really, Marian?_

_Fine. A deranged, half-molted grouse?_

_Better._

She wanted to lay her head on the ridiculous pile of feathers he wore on his shoulders, but that would get the tired smile. Tonight she was playing for the scowl. 

As he called for another card to be laid in front of him Hawke’s hand flashed up and the tip of the knife snicked through the cord in his hair. The blade was sharp enough that there was no tug, like parting water, and before his hair had even fallen into his eyes she had slid the knife up her sleeve. 

It was joy to watch him glare at the sudden fall of ruddy gold in his eyes. He reached back and pulled the cord from under the mess and then brought it before his eyes. They narrowed as he looked at the ends of the neat cut, edges as sharp as Hawke’s smile as she buried her nose in her mug. 

Isabela laughed, high and long on the other side of the table, while his cheeks turned pink and the way he looked anywhere but at Hawke gave her the best-worst kind of ache in her gut. 

Hawke pulled the lacing from the neck of her blouse, saved from indecency in fact, if not in mind, by the vest she wore over it, and under her coat. “Let me get that for you.” 

She stood and pulled his hair back with her slick rogue hands, every brush of her fingers against the top of his ear or the nape of his neck entirely intentional. He sat frozen for the few seconds it took her to replace the tie with her lacing, until she dropped her hands. 

His face was further flushed now, the slightest sheen of sweat at his temples. If teasing was all he’d accept from her, that’s what he’d get. 

“There you go, Anders.” 

_It’s been years and you say Anders and you still mean love._

_Always will. Always will._

* * *

The third time wasn’t Anders at all. 

It was Justice. 

There was blood, so much blood and Templar parts, and the blue-white crackle in his eyes and under his skin. And a girl that looked at him with horror that mirrored what Anders had always thought was true. 

Hawke had punched a mirror once to break the face of misery she saw looking back at her. She got it. 

When Justice reached to take the mageling, Hawke stepped in front of his hand and looked into the roiling blue of the Fade, stepped close, achingly close, and he smelled like madness and hot metal, and herbs, and home. 

_Oh, so not a good idea. You kind of liked your skin on the outside of your other parts._

“Anders,” she breathed, and the spirit paused, expression gone confused from murderous. 

_Love. Always._

_Always._

Both hands that time, at the sides of his head. In the thrashing and the fighting, that Justice did with his borrowed body too close to the blade edges, most of his hair had come undone. Her fingers pulled back through it, drawing it away from his face and she leaned in closer, until if she were taller, or Justice had leaned down, their foreheads would touch. 

_It’s a wonder he’s never called your slouchiness unjust._

Fade spirits knew a thing or two about posture, turned out. 

“Hey, Anders. Come on back.” She moved her hands for a second pass, fingers dragging through the silk, across the scalp and the blue flickered out and for just a moment he leaned toward her. 

“Marian.” There was horror in the word. The first time he had ever said her proper name, and it sounded like he was choking on it. She wasn’t sure if she should stop up his mouth with her fist or her lips just so she wouldn’t have to hear him say her name like that. 

It sounded like _goodbye_.

The spirit fire was gone, but now Hawke felt burned and she jerked her hands away. He looked at her like she’d slapped him, and he turned, then disappeared. 

She would follow, because if he did it once he might say it again, and that couldn’t be the only time. Even if it never sounded like _love_ , she couldn’t live with what she’d heard. She sent Ella on her way, out of the Gallows, far from Kirkwall and then she turned toward him, as if she could see him through the tangle of Darktown.

Hawke still had gobbets of Templar on her boots. “Maker, Anders.”

* * *

The fourth time broke the dam. 

The byways, pits, and tunnels of Darktown were crowded as always, and even so late at night that it had become early in the morning the shantytown wasn’t silent. Coughing, weeping, moaning… it was a symphony of human misery. 

Hawke missed the crickets and frogs of Lothering. 

She missed a lot of things she’d had in Lothering. Ineffective, bumpkinly Templars. Fresh cider from the press in autumn. Her father. The affections of simple boys with simple smiles. Her brother and her sister. Her mother’s laughter. 

_Cheerful. Very cheerful._

It was hard to be cheerful in Kirkwall, especially while bleeding from a shiv in the back from some low-rent shakedown artist that she’d literally tripped on in the alley two houses away from her own mansion in Hightown. 

How did that even happen? Too many at the Hanged Man and an overdeveloped sense of one’s place in the world. 

She kept a hand pressed to the wound as she leaned under the lantern outside the clinic. The wound was in an awkward spot for her to see, and she had a feeling based on the amount of blood that was still seeping from between her fingers, that this wasn’t really the time to trust to her own field medicine skills. 

Seeping might have been kind. Trickling? Closer. Not a gush, at least. Gushing was what the unlucky shivver had done when she used said shiv to stab him in the neck. He didn’t even make it all the way to the mouth of the alley before he bled out. She was cold, and tired, and if all she had to hug was her professional pride, she’d take it. 

The ground seemed like a better option and she settled onto it to wait. Waiting? Anders, yes, him. Why hadn’t he opened the door yet? Had she knocked? 

The hand she used to slap flat against the door three times was the wet and sticky one. 

It was definitely a flow and she was sitting in a slowly accumulating puddle of her own blood. 

_So that’s where all the warm went._

“Anders?” Another feeble slap. “Bleeding out here. Bleeding out out here. Give us a hand, would you? I’ll Anders you forever if you help me, Anders.” 

_Maybe, Marian, you should just shut up now._

The quiet was nice too. 

How she wound up lying on her face on one of Anders’ tables with her jacket and vest peeled off and her shirt rucked up to her shoulder blades might always be a mystery, but she was glad she wasn’t dead. There wasn’t any pain in her back anymore, just a big ball of lead pressing on her spine. 

_You still there, toes?_

The toes wiggled. That was a relief. 

“Annnfffpppprrt.” She tried again after turning her head to the side so her nose was no longer smashed into her lips. “Anders?” Gummy eyes focused on his back as he straightened near the door, dusting his hands over his knees. “What are you doing?” 

“Putting out milk.” 

“Ahh, yes, that explains… unng… everything.” She was trying to roll onto her side, but not all her muscles seemed to connect properly at the moment. “Little help?” 

“I miss having a cat around.” His tone was mild, congenial, his lips holding a slight smile of polite professional interest. “But I think the refugees have scared them all off. Or maybe eaten them.” He stops next to the table and folds his arms. 

He was just out of Hawke’s reach as she held out a flopping hand, expecting him to take it and pull her up. One raised eyebrow politely declined. “Come on, Anders. The table is hard, and I’m getting a splinter in my ear.” 

“That sounds serious. You’ve had a rough few hours with the splinters, and the table, and getting stabbed in your bloody kidney.” He managed to sound perfectly unconcerned by any of it. 

“It was pretty bloody, yeah.” She manages to push off the table with one arm, rolling onto her back. Well trying to. Mostly she was falling off the table. 

_Recently healed stabbed organ, enjoy meeting the filth of a Darktown floor._

He grabbed her shoulder before she could go over. The surprise managed to damage his pleasant mask, and his hand jumped away from her arm as soon as she was steadied. “Maker’s breath, Hawke.” He was close enough now for her to grab and she did, lacing her fingers through the lowest ring on the front of his absurd coat. He looked down at it as if it were painful. “Do you have no sense of self-preservation?” 

“Are you asking me if I’m saving myself for you?” It just fell out of her mouth, like it always did, glib and idiotic and a little bit desperate. 

_Maker, this is why pirates make terrible best friends. The worst of influences._

The hand that closed on her wrist was warm, and she noticed as his thumb rubbed ever so slightly on the knob of bone, that her skin was clean. He’d washed her hand. His eyes were fixed there on his fingers circling her bony arm, and she couldn’t see his eyes as she levered herself up to sit, with her legs spread so that if she tugged forward just a little he’d wind up between her knees.

The growly whine she emitted as she moved around so much was a bit embarrassing, but she’d made it upright and now she looked into his face. He looked lost, staring at his hand, brow furrowed, the faintest of frowns tugging on his lips. 

“Hey. Hey, Anders? Thank you for putting my kidney back inside. It’s rude to faint before the handsome apostate has your clothes off, so cheers for soldiering on.” Her knuckles whitened on the brass ring. She wasn’t letting go. He’d have to cut the fingers off. 

“Why do you do this, Hawke? I’ve tried and I’ve tried to hold back and you just push and you pick and it isn’t funny anymore. It wasn’t ever funny.” The edge of his voice was raw and naked and his hand on her wrist tightened until she could see the flesh paling around his fingertips from the pressure. 

“I’m not laughing.” Was he holding back from kissing her or killing her? Did he think her teasing was… well _teasing_? “Well, I am, but that’s only because I am really very funny, not because I’m laughing at you.” She gave that tug now against his belt and he was startled forward by the strength in her arm, even weak from blood loss and stupidity, and this lean, rawboned man stepped forward, hips squeezed between her knees. 

The other hand, the one not caught in a life and death struggle of not ripping his clothes off while he stood there, stunned… Yeah that hand, the lazy one, finally fluttered up and settled on the back of his neck, her eyes closing as fingers slid into the hair that was too short to tie back. 

“You can’t want this. You can’t. You saw what I almost did to that girl. You’ve seen what I am.” Where her thumb rested next to his throat she felt the sharp bob of him swallowing, and she looked at him again. There was a terrible, fatal hope blooming in his eyes. “Marian, I…” 

_Oh._

Seated on the high table it was possible to pull him down just a smidge to meet her lips, and with fingers wound into his hair, tight against the scalp, so that it was all tugged loose from the tie, she did. No room for argument, no room for more stupid, fumbling words.

She needed to taste his mouth with her name still in it, and she pressed her lips against his, tugged them open with her teeth, swiped her tongue inside and when he moaned and unclenched his jaw, when he let go, she had him. 

But as much as she loved him, compassion and fury, madness and all, he was still a bit of an ass so he stopped her when she tried to unfasten his coat and tug at the shirt under it. “Marian. Mae. Wait.” 

_Oh._

She thought he’d said her name like _love_ before but there it was, sweeter, sharper, keen as the edge of any of her knives and because he said it she waited, and listened as he breathed into her ear, “This will be a disaster.” 

“Did you see where my daggers wandered off to?” If the kissing wasn’t working, she’d move on to the stabbing. 

His next words were tangled up with his surprise, laughing and defensive. “But I can’t live without it!” 

She nodded as she dragged nails along his scalp and watched him shudder. “Too right. Because I’ll kill you if you stop.” She wasn’t ever letting go of him, the bitter and the bright of herbs and his musty coat. She buried her nose behind his ear and inhaled. 

_Elfroot and lemon balm._

He laughed softly, sadly and leaned away from her. “Leave your door open tonight and I’ll come.” His finger pressed over her lips before any of the cheap innuendo that bubbled up in her throat could spill forth. 

_Thank the Maker for that. It’s a nice moment and it would be a shame to get it all sticky._

“If you change your mind--” He winced as she bit his finger. Hard. If she didn’t get to ruin the moment neither did he. “If it’s locked--” His eyes widened as she clamped down harder. Much more and he would bleed. “I’ll know you finally took my warning.” There the cuticle went. “Andraste’s knickerweasels, Mae!” He jerked his hand away from her mouth. 

“If I can suffer through three years of begging you to love me, you can bleed a little for me.” She pushed him away and slid off the table, sniffing as she tugged her torn and bloody shirt down. Finding her jacket not far off she wriggled into it, the leather stiff with more dried red. 

He was watching her with his injured finger in his own mouth, shaking his head from side to side, disbelief scampering around his face. Maker, he was beautiful. 

“I’ll see you tonight, Anders.” 

_Always, love._

_Always._

* * *

There were a thousand times after that.

A thousand and a thousand more. Laughing sweetly with his head on her breast, fingers tracing slow lines through gold silk, limbs naked and tangled. Rocking him against the nightmares that come too often, carding steady and gentle, like so long ago in the Deep Roads. 

Under the stars, on the deck of Isabela’s ship, the first week out of Kirkwall he weeps his grief and guilt out over the Gallows, but never the Chantry. She buries her face against his nape, curled around his back as she holds him together, as he once held her when she was in pieces, and whispers his name again and again until he believes that she is there and will never leave him. 

He grows it longer for her. When it is shorn as part of an ill-advised attempt at disguise after the liberation of Cumberland sparks the great third wave of Templar hunters, she mourns it dramatically. 

“I shall stuff a pillow with it, that _you_ embroider.” 

He laughs, awkward and shy like a boy that hasn’t grown into his features yet and she rubs her face on the fuzz and kisses a scar she didn’t know was there. 

The hunters catch them anyway, leave Hawke in a ditch bubbling through a slurry of mud and her own blood, Anders taken. But that doesn’t last. 

_Because, always._

As it grows back, it is grayer, and she pets it as she sings to drown out the growing song and knows someday there will be a last time. She hopes, she hopes so hard that it is not in the dark, sticky with tainted blood, but surely there are a thousand more yet. 

A thousand times she will run her fingers through his hair and remember the first time and every time and always.

**Author's Note:**

> Continuity Notes: My headcanon is that Hawke took all her peeps (except for Aveline because she has an actual job, and Sebastian because he isn't really her peep here) to the Deep Roads, and that Bethany died even though Anders was there.
> 
> Also: Apologies to Catullus #5.


End file.
